Lizzie Moore, shocked by the words, maintained her composure. She’d never been an emotional person.
“Why? What happened?”
“They were shot to death, in a car. The girl was wearing an Atlanta High School class ring with the initials PAM. The school thinks it belongs to your daughter. They would like for you to go to Texarkana and verify this.”
It was the Moore family’s introduction to the tragic news. Lizzie Moore owned an old-model automobile that wasn’t reliable. She called a neighbor. The neighbors’ son-in-law drove Lizzie and her son Mark to Texarkana, to the funeral home where she was shown the girl’s body. It was, indeed, Polly.
Mark Moore was a fourteen-year-old sophomore in high school. Dealing with adversity, throughout the Depression, had steeled the family for the unexpected. Polly’s death was a loss they would never get over, but they would deal with it without breaking down. After they finished their business in Texarkana, they left for Atlanta to make funeral arrangements. They would remain in Cass County, where the funeral would be.
Ardella Campbell, in whose home Polly roomed, had worked her regular shift as a telephone operator the night before and wasn’t immediately aware that Polly wasn’t sleeping in her room. She and her mother soon learned that Polly wasn’t home. Ardella felt a sense of responsibility for her young cousin’s safety and grew agitated. This isn’t like Polly. What has happened? She wasn’t long in learning that the worst had happened.
Lizzie Moore called from Cass County before leaving for Texarkana.
Ardella’s best friend, Maurice Richardson, lived right around the corner. Maurice’s husband worked nights as a switchman for the railroad. That Sunday morning he had arrived home and gone directly to bed. Ardella, crying on the phone, called her friend Maurice. Polly had been found dead. She had been killed. Ardella choked out the news between sobs.
Ardella didn’t own a car. The Richardsons had an old Chevrolet.
“Will you take me out there where they found the body?” Ardella asked.
The two women herded the four children—Maurice’s two daughters and a son, plus Ardella’s daughter—into the Richardsons’ car and drove to the crime scene.
The experience burned into the memory of Maurice’s daughter Patti, the oldest of the children.
“It was out in the country. There were trees in the background, but up front was just a great big open field. It looked like a lot of cars had been along there, a one-lane dirt road. A dirt trail only went so far into the field. It was where people had been driving in there and parking, and that’s what Richard and Polly did. The car was near the woods. They drove in there and they were parked, and. . . .
“Well, when we drove up there, there were cars all the way up from where Richard Griffin’s car was parked. It was still there. And Mother just pulled right off of [Highway] 67 and in behind that long line of cars. She and Ardella got out and walked down there. They would not let any of us children go—at all. Mother said, ‘Don’t you dare get out of the car!’ I did get out of the car, though. I was gonna see what I could see. I saw the car, with people gathered around. I was in the second grade, and so I remember that it was a real tearful thing, and Ardella was very, very upset.
“Mother and Ardella were gone a long time. When they got back to the car where I was keeping my brother and sister and Ardella’s daughter, they were grim-faced and tearful—visibly shaken.”
The bodies had been removed by then.
“But the car was still there. And the blood was just everywhere. I remember them talking about a great big pool of blood right in front of the car.”
The crowd had thinned out by the time Isaac Rounsavall and his son Ray drove unexpectedly upon the murder site. Rounsavall was driving to Highway 67 via the crooked unpaved connections between Highways 59 and 67. The boy saw a half-dozen or so people there, with policemen stationed at the highway to keep others out.
The elder Rounsavall saw Sheriff Presley and got out of the car and walked over to him. Young Ray took in the scene as a curious boy would. The bodies had been moved; the death car remained by the ditch, headed south, framed by rampant honeysuckle. Blood was all over the inside of the car.
Ray watched a young man with a baby girl cradled in his arm, walking about, peering at the ground and all around. About fifty feet from the car, the man suddenly stopped, bent over, the little girl still in the crook of his left arm, and picked up a set of keys. Ray had heard the men say there’d been no keys in the ignition of the Oldsmobile. The man handed the keys to Presley. With a crowd milling around earlier, the officers had not seen the keys, trampled into the soft wet earth by numerous feet.
Later James and Sandy King, en route to one of the few stores open on Sunday, arrived at the intersection of Robinson Road and Highway 67 West. They were in a truck that King drove for a wrecking business. At the highway they saw a crowd milling around on the dirt road across the highway. He turned and passed by a deputy sheriff he recognized. The deputy, Frank Riley, was directing traffic. Towing damaged cars was King’s job.
“Is it a wreck?” he hollered.
“No, it’s a murder,” replied the deputy. He motioned at King. “Come on back. We need to move the car over to the Arkansas police station.”
King crossed the highway and backed the wrecker close enough to Griffin’s Oldsmobile to hook it to the winch. He hauled it onto West Seventh Street and eastward. Once the Oldsmobile was set down in the alley by the Arkansas police station, the policemen and King pushed it to a space where the fingerprint specialist could go over it.
When King returned to the wrecker, Sandy, who had remained in the truck, shook her head in wonder.
“I don’t understand why everybody’d push the car by hand. They just put that many more fingerprints on it!”
Her husband shrugged. Neither of them realized yet that other disorderly crime scenes would eventually follow, obscuring or obliterating potentially crucial evidence.
A physician examined Polly Moore’s body and determined she had not been raped—or “criminally assaulted,” in the term of the day. But in one of the mix-ups that followed, after the bodies were taken from the scene and given a cursory examination, a hearse conveyed her body late that very afternoon to the funeral home in Atlanta in the next county, so there could be no corroborating autopsy. Griffin’s body remained at the Texarkana Funeral Home the rest of that Sunday and the following day.
In addition to the physician’s assessment that Polly had not been raped, other evidence supported the opinion. Max Tackett, at the time with the Arkansas State Police but in touch with the Texas side, noted that the victim was still wearing a sanitary pad at the time of death. This fact tended to back up the physician’s conclusion. The killer’s moving her body from outside to inside the car seems to have been part of a plan to conceal the deaths as long as possible, at least until dawn, by which time he presumably would have made his getaway. Rumors of rape, however, soon spread and persisted for decades.
The Griffin family—Bernice, her son David, and her daughter Eleanor—had finished breakfast and were sitting around the living room reading the Sunday newspaper when a neighbor knocked on the door. Telephones were rare at Robison Courts; the Griffins had none. The neighbor had just heard a news item on a local radio station about a couple being killed. He thought Richard was the male victim. Word eventually reached them that the car had been taken to the Arkansas-side police station, along with some of Richard’s clothes, because the fingerprinting equipment there was more reliable.
“We were stunned,” David Griffin said.
Friends took the Griffins to the other side of the state line. It was Richard’s car, all right. They also positively identified the clothing.
The Griffins never visited the crime scene. They didn’t see Richard’s body until it was at the funeral home. Actually, the murder spot itself was within walking distance from their home in Robison Courts—a long walk but not a great distance. But after identifying the O
ldsmobile and his clothing and viewing the body, they’d had a surfeit of tragedy.
Welborn Griffin, Richard’s other brother three months out of the Army, was married and living in Dallas. As soon as they could, Welborn and his wife and baby left Dallas by train.
Welborn arrived at the funeral home after midnight. He went inside and found one man on duty.
He identified himself to the attendant. “I want to see Richard’s body and see where he was shot.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin,” the man said. “I can’t do that. The officers told us not to let any family members see where he was shot.”
Welborn was astonished.
“I want to know why I can’t see where my brother was shot!”
Heated words bounced between them, and finally Welborn told him, “Well, I’m going to see where Richard was shot. If you don’t turn the body over, I’m going to turn it over myself! Unless you’re big enough to whip me and keep me from it.”
Welborn Griffin, like his brother, was strong and well built. His grief and anger reinforced his demand. The man turned the body over and Welborn saw where two bullets had entered the back of Richard’s head. He struggled to control his emotions as he stood before his brother’s corpse. He saw no exit wound in the front of the head. The bullets hadn’t been removed.
He walked several blocks to the Texas-side police station.
“There was a bunch of officers. I told them who I was and began to try to find out something. Well, they give me the runaround. And I tried asking an officer some questions, and this other officer he got in on the conversation and told me that they found Richard’s car keys a hundred yards out there in that marsh from where they found the bodies which was just a dirt road. I said, ‘You mean a hundred feet, not a hundred yards, don’t you?’
“‘No, it was a hundred yards, because we measured it.’
“I said, ‘I don’t believe me, you, or nobody else can throw a set of car keys a hundred yards.’
“That ended that conversation. I was afraid I was going to really get into a confrontation with him.”
Had Welborn Griffin known how the keys were actually found, in the dirt by the man cradling a baby girl, after the crowd had dispersed, he might have sustained his argument. It was an example of how fast facts became distorted as word-of-mouth accounts changed, sometimes radically, and repeatedly.
“I stayed there till near daylight,” said Griffin. “About daylight, I went to the cab stand—it wasn’t far down there—and caught a cab and went to Robison Courts where my mother and sister and Richard and David all lived.
“They were up. They hadn’t slept any all night. It just was sadness, crying, and everything. Nobody could figure out why.”
In a city in which crime was a constant, the murders left no doubt as to the case’s overriding importance. Most of the violent crimes in Texarkana could be connected to something—an unpaid debt, a drunken fight, jealousy, or even racism. But the deaths of Polly and Richard were disconcertingly random. An eight-column nearly inch-high front-page banner proclaimed the tragedy in Monday morning’s Texarkana Gazette.
COUPLE FOUND SHOT TO DEATH IN AUTO
Accompanying the article were photographs of the two victims, a studio photo of a handsome Griffin and a snapshot of a smiling Polly Moore, with her black-and-white dog, on the front steps of her home while she was in high school. The photo had been found in her purse next to her body.
A justice of the peace executed the death certificates, assessing the cause of death identically in each case: “Gun shot in base of skull.”
At work Monday morning, Byron Brower, Jr., noticed that Polly Moore, with whom he had been working as she checked the ammunition trucks, hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t read the newspaper yet. Others began talking about the murders, and he then realized that the young woman’s body he had seen in the car the morning before was that of Polly. He hadn’t been close enough to recognize her.
Polly’s services were held at the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Monday afternoon in the little community of Bryans Mill, with burial in the cemetery near where she had been born seventeen years before.
It was late Monday afternoon when the police notified Welborn Griffin that his brother’s body was being released. He called the funeral home in Cass County, and two men accompanied him to the police station to acquire the release. When they arrived, they learned of a change in plans. A Texas Ranger was on the way. The body couldn’t be released until he arrived.
Welborn Griffin and the undertakers waited in the police station for what seemed an interminable period. He heard two uniformed policemen talking about the antics of two women, both drunk, after the bodies and car had been moved. Blood had seeped out of the car onto the ground beneath. One of the women shoved the other down and tried to push her nose into the blood in the dirt. Welborn didn’t know whether to believe it or not. One policeman said the crowd of onlookers had grown so large, later, that there was hardly standing room.
The Ranger—Jimmy Geer—finally arrived at nine o’clock that night.
As the Ranger bounded up the stairs, the officers—Griffin said—“were just like a bunch of little kids with a schoolteacher. They all run up there and tried to talk at the same time, so he jumped up in a chair and started to cussing and told ’em to shut up! They did.
“And the first question he asked ’em was, ‘When y’all found that car and the bodies, did y’all rope that area off? And secure it until you could make a thorough investigation?’
“And they told him, ‘No.’
“And I’ll tell you the exact words he said. Told ’em, ‘Well, if you didn’t do that, you destroyed all the goddamned evidence there was!’ That’s just the words he told ’em, right there.”
The room turned chaotic. “They did a lot of talking and I couldn’t tell a word that was said, to save my neck.” The Ranger created a checklist to ensure that all possible evidence would be collected. Foremost was to retrieve the bullets from Richard Griffin’s head, a procedure not done in Polly’s case. Eventually Welborn gained a release of his brother’s body, and the funeral director took it back to Cass County for services. By that time it was nearly daylight.
That afternoon—Tuesday—Richard’s services were held in the Union Chapel church, close to where the family home had been, his grave just inside the cemetery gate. In death, both had returned to Cass County, six miles apart.
Welborn was never satisfied with the response, then or later, from the Texas-side officers.
The town that had two of almost everything and promoted itself with paired images now had an unexpected, unexplained double murder on its hands, one that was not quite like any of the numerous crimes it had known before. But that wasn’t apparent at first, and this was likely why the police and rangers at the time were so lax with their due process in the immediate aftermath of discovering the bodies.
From the beginning, the Griffin-Moore case was a huge one, larger than it first appeared. Dozens of well-coordinated detectives—compiling and processing evidence, filing information, interviewing suspects and potential witnesses, scouring the area—would hardly have been overkill. But manpower, or rather the lack of it, was a problem from the start.
Even worse, evidence was sparse. The bullets taken from Richard Griffin’s head, the hulls of the bullets, and possibly (or possibly not) fingerprints from the dead man’s car—these were the only tangible clues. The bullets that killed Polly Moore had not been removed and had been buried with her body. It was assumed the same weapon killed her as killed Griffin. The cartridge shells seemed to come from the same gun. If the bullets were needed later, her body could be exhumed. If any witnesses existed, it would take energetic, and lucky, digging to identify and locate those.
Although lawmen recognized the case as an exceptional one, residents appeared not overly upset or fearful. The vicious attack upon Mary Jeanne Larey and Jimmy Hollis the month before had faded from most people’s memory. People with no connect
ion to either case tended to wonder if the killer hadn’t known the couple and executed them out of revenge or jealousy.
In the new case, no suspect could be identified; no motive seemed to exist. Those who knew the victims couldn’t provide the slightest information that might lead to a suspect. The verdict of the justice of the peace remained valid: they had died at the hands of an unknown person for unknown reasons.
The morning after his Monday night arrival, Ranger Geer retraced the investigation up to that point, going over the clues presented him and driving to the murder scene where the bodies and Griffin’s car had been found, searching for any clues that might have been overlooked. Two days after the crime, it was futile. The milling throng, following on the heels of rain, fatally complicated the officers’ work.
The ballistics report from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Bureau of Identification and Records offered the first—and only—solid link to the killer, keyed to the cartridge shells found at the death scene and the bullets extracted from Richard Griffin’s body. The murder weapon was a .32 automatic pistol with six lands and grooves with a left-hand twist. It was determined to be a Colt or a similar foreign make. Although veterans had brought back any number of foreign-made guns as souvenirs from the recent war, most likely the gun was American-made and therefore a Colt.
The evidence was assigned the filing label L-11672/0-261, to be maintained for comparison with any other pistol and bullets that might turn up.
This did not mean that there was a definite tie to just any .32 Colt automatic that officers might find. It would have to be test-fired to confirm a fit. It was not an uncommon weapon, but was a relatively small handgun that could be readily concealed—and used—very easily.
(Although investigators found no murder weapon after scouring the brush and surrounding area, coincidentally, more than three years later several little girls did find a pistol a quarter-mile from the crime scene. In October 1949, ten-year-old Marie Barlow and girls her age were playing in an open field of about five acres with tall, knee-deep grass when they came upon a rusted, dirt-clogged pistol. They reported it to an adult, who passed it on to authorities. Was it linked to the 1946 murders? Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley dashed any speculation. It was a .38 caliber Spanish-made revolver. The murder weapon had been an automatic, not a six-shooter, and a different caliber. Lawmen periodically found discarded weapons. Whatever the explanation, it did not fit into the murder case.)
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 5
